Reincarnation Games
by Raihu
Summary: KikKag fiction collection; They say that all we can ever truly fall in love with is the image of ourselves, mirrored in the faces of others.
1. Stagger

A/N - For LJ's 30shards. (**may/11/2007:** Old, awkwardly styled, melodramatic. I do believe my work is finished here.)

* * *

**Title** - Stagger  
**Pairing** - Kikyou/Kagome  
**Theme** - _Memories  
_**Genre** - General  
**Rating** - 13+  
**Length** - About 4100 words  
**Squicks** - Nope  
**Summary -** We live our lives from beginning to end, slowly earning the right to forget.

* * *

Stagger

For as long as she can remember, Kikyou has remembered.

Against her will, against the grain of her old, holy wisdom, it rises in her like the tide – it closes on her like a tireless animal – it simply _happens_ when she cannot bear to look upon a world that no longer has any place for her, and she closes her eyes, and she gives herself up to the black beach of blindness. The remembering waits for her there, on a shore that has never known the turning of the winds or the cries of greedy gulls; the waves have faces – hands – names – and they reach for her, over and over and over again, scrabbling with silver fingers, curling inward and slinking back and rushing at her, because she is their mother, their centre, the unfufilled promise of their salvation. They call. She hears them. And, though she can rarely make out the words, she always remembers their voices.

She _remembers_.

Like laughter and the immortal threat of death, it is something that all living creatures must endure: remembering. But Kikyou is not alive. But the threat of death grew bold and closed its black jaws on her head fifty years ago. The memories should have been squeezed out, the bowl of her broken skull licked clean.

She wonders; _if not through_ _death, how does one escape from remembering?_

The memories reply; _one does not_.

* * *

When she sleeps, all of the frightened, flowing faces twist into masks of anger. Clumsy fingers sprout claws. Fangs crowd the mouths of her friends and family, lancing through their soft lips, gleaming as they gaze up at the peak of the missing sky and weave her name into a song of cobbled echoes. 

Locked in the dark, she watches them learn to stand, gouging each other's flanks as they shamble toward her. Sleek, pale bodies, lurching then walking then gliding like ghosts, pressing close enough that the darkness thins and their claws slip through. Cold hands curl around her waist and arms; flinted talontips press the shallow valley between her collarbones.

_The priestess who carries the jewel_, they howl. _The purest of all, she does not live in a bone_-_dust body!_

With a violent tug, they wrench her apart. Her flesh falls to powder, and firelight flickers quicksilver along the icy hands through which she crumbles.

_only a dream only a dream_

It is not a dream. It is another memory, the most bold and fearsome of them all, stalking her without doubt or shame. Incandescent with the power it holds over her, it flares in place of the spark of life, feeding her, being fed, shifting restlessly as she watches until the details are clouded, shrouded, and she can be certain of nothing anymore.

All it lets her know is that she felt something sharp and cruel pass through her body, and then she was being burned away, away, away, until she knew nothing at all.

* * *

No one thinks that she is holy anymore and, though Kikyou knows this probably true, she can hardly help feeling betrayed. Once, long ago, she _had_ something; a glimmer, a mote of magic that repelled monstrous creatures intolerant of virtue – and everyone knew, and everyone saw, and they drank it in, sucked it from her skin, leaving only the dry, damned husk of her body behind. She would have stopped them, if only she had known what was happening. 

If only. Wind on the water, whispering in the back of her mind; _if only_.

If only she had never heard the words _if only_. She imagines her life would be better, or at least much less complicated; the knots and tangles tied up with strings of regret would be loose, dangling from her fingertips – she could toss them upward and hang weightless, suspended from the clouds.

She would. If she could.

_If only_.

But the clouds cannot carry her heavy heart, and she has no way to bind herself to them; all of her snarled strings are already attached to things that live in the black ocean behind her eyes. Perhaps that is why the memories will not leave her; she has bound herself to them, and has no knife to cut them free.

She imagines her life would be better if she did. She imagines blades and insults and other sharp things with the dreadful, wild hunger of a demon, and all she has now is all she once scorned.

* * *

Sometimes, when her wanderpath carries her to the edge of a flat, silent pond that lies like crystal scum beside a forest or a field or the first shattered cliffs carving out a stairway up into the mountains – sometimes she bends low and stares at herself in the water. Stares the way the villagers must have stared; hardly thinking, hardly breathing, only freezing, gazing, _drinking_. Never blinking. Her reflection stares back, startled, perhaps a little afraid. In her head, she names it _Kagome_, and it is young and new and beloved by all in tarnished Kikyou's place. 

_So_. Her stomach heaves, clenching around the empty spaces where food should be. _That's what all of this is about_.

On this night, by this pond, the wind is dead like Kikyou's flesh. There are no whispers, and there are no waves, and so there are no faces. Still, even under a fine veneer of sneering starlight, the beach is black, and the reaching, silver hands must only be asleep beneath the water's smooth surface, claws sheathed, fingers limp and drifting – but ready. She can smell them, waiting nearby to grip her with a tale of the terrible past. She would stand to flee, if only – _if only_! – she could remember how.

_burned away, away, away_

She remembers: her skin and bones blackened, smoke in the air, mingling with ash, twisting heat, tears, burnt blood, fury, hatred, and _nononopleasecomeback_. Veiled and misted, all of it, as though balanced on the fringe of something brighter than the most sacred flame. Everything is smeared, and colours race like hunted things, and the only face she truly knows is her own; closed, peaceful, then consumed. She presides over the ritual burning, watching until the point of fierce, raging light clutched in her dead fingers flickers out. And she follows. And it is done.

Or should have been.

She remembers: her face most of all, vivid and sharp-angled. Fire-wreathed and not-quite lost. Her face. Her pride. She is surrounded by a sea of mourners, and they reach toward her solemn face as she slides away, hands dusted silver as the air fills with her ashes.

_Her face_.

Is different.

It is not the one she sees reflected in the dark water, or in the eyes of eager young girls she would use as substitutes for her lost little sister. The fine features do not belong to her; they cannot; they were burned long ago. What she remembers is the face of a powerful priestess, and what she sees in the water below is a creature called Kagome.

What she has forgotten is which face belongs to her.

_

* * *

Am I not myself any longer? _

She wakes from a deep sleep like second-death, knowing that she has just committed the gravest of sins. The dead do not rise. They do not look up at the morning sky as it blanches in fear of the sun, and they most certainly do not step forward into the embrace of another day. They do not, they do not; the obedient dead lie motionless and dream forever of nothing.

Kikyou knows that she is damned. She felt it briefly in her soul, and then even her soul was taken away, so she could not feel at all. And that apathy – she knows there is no sign more sure than that. Feeling the absence of feeling, she sits with her back to a diseased tree and wonders what killed her; the wounds in her flesh, the fury in her heart, or the Shikon jewel itself, grown tired of bathing in her blazing nimbus day after day after day.

It hardly matters. The last and first thing she remembers is InuYasha; smirking, soaring, thinking he has won. She should have killed him. She thought she had, and finds it cruelest of all that she must exist again to bear both the weight of damnation and the knowledge that she had faltered at the end.

_Faltered at the false end_, her memories sigh, disappointed. _And all the gods fell away like illusions_.

The only things that are real, Kikyou has learned, are the things that should not be; a monster she meant to destroy, and the vessel that her stolen soul has come to inhabit. Even now she senses them, living lives that should belong to her; one like the cold coils of a hungry serpent, his love or hatred running thick as blood in her empty veins; the other like a new shell still wet on her skin, trapping her in a strange place with a name that is not her own and a pair of deep, damp eyes misted over with terrible, innocent compassion.

She cannot escape them. Both are part of her now, caught up in things she once took for truths and old memories of herself.

_Am I not myself?_

* * *

She is not herself today. She wanders the woods, touching leaves and dirt and the old bones she finds lying beneath a bed of dry autumn rot. Sunlight bleeds through the canopy, staining her shoulder; she can find no way to wind it up in her fingers, so she retreats to the deep shadows, distressed. 

Everything is strangely unstrange. Though she wanders, lost, thinking that all paths in the world must have changed since the time she was last in it, the sun and the seasons and the singing birds seem to know their way as surely as ever. They soar through their familiar arcs in a daze, stepping neatly around Kikyou. She is a venomous snake from beyond these woods, and – although the roots and soil and rich, sultry rot could learn how to accept her – she can feel that her dead flesh is not entirely welcome on the mouldering leaves.

Angry and a little frightened, she walks until the trees cannot keep up with her and finally fall away. Her tireless feet carry her to a field where there is no shade, where no flowers or berry bushes bloom, where the only thing that moves is the horizon; rippling clouds blowing in from the distant sea, wavering hills heaped before her on the sharp ledge where land meets sky. Standing in the light, she holds her long sleeves tight in both hands and recites body parts in the back of her head, then the names of healing herbs and how they must be prepared, then the ceremonial cants that every skilled priestess knows – regardless of whether or not she believes in ceremony.

_A truly skilled priestess, she does not live in a _–

Anything to stave off the mounting terror, the sense that she does not belong and will soon be discovered. Facts, poetry, names, spells, flickering through her head like frantic wings. Remembering a thousand things at once, letting the memories crash down and over and around with all the violence they possess.

_she does not live in_

Sunset calms her. The coming of night is a balm for her sunburned heart. When the first pale stars prickle in the sky, she sees them balanced like bright tears on the rim of a great black eye and every drop of her apprehension is blinked away.

By moonlight, nothing is swift or sure. Fierce, accusing edges melt, flowing into the whisper and suggestion of soft shapes, shy and nameless. The world is peopled with silhouettes and small, hidden hunters that trust nothing outside the reach of their paws. Day is a time for peaked judgement and speed and action, and the whipping wind of life's passing leaves Kikyou staggered, breathless – but night belongs to things like her. Things that expect to be struck down at any moment, that wear the darkness like a disguise, hoping to hide and stalk and survive a little longer. Perhaps even long enough to see another menacing dawn.

She travels by night now, and she knows what she must do.

_she does_

* * *

Late at night, Kagome twists and Kagome turns, feeling her skin fret and fidget around something that squirms in her gut like a many-limbed parasite. She can't sleep. She can't even trick herself into dreaming about it. There is a restlessness that lives inside her, sinking root into the marrow of her bones; it twists, she turns, but neither is able to wrench free of the other. 

Everything is dark and cold and she feels things slinking where they cannot be watched.

By the light of a last, brooding ember, she can see the bundled shapes of her friends strewn across the sheer shelf of rock on which they have made camp. They all seem to be sleeping. Bundled into the crook of Kagome's arm, Shippo certainly is; he has curled up like Buyo, with his thick tail over his face and a slow, deliberate rhythm to his breathing. Kagome nearly expects to hear him purr, is always vaguely disappointed when he doesn't.

Not that he has anything to purr about tonight. The air is frigid; the bare rock is rough and intrusive, even through the thick layer of her bedroll. She, of course, had opposed the idea of settling down in such a desolate place, but Sango had been adamant. Before the sun had even dipped to taste the distant hills, she'd sent everyone off in search of firewood and started an enormous blaze in the centre of a wide, flat rock lodged in the soil. Sweating, streaked with soot, she tended it for hours, then banked the leaping flames when their colour matched the bloodstained sky, and scattered its glowing skeleton all around. Inuyasha had called her a madwoman, but now even he was coming to recognize the wisdom of what she had done. Early winter winds were blowing inland from the sea, and twilight descended like the edge of a sword; not long after the full darkness of night had spread itself over the surrounding meadow, Inuyasha climbed wordlessly down from his perch in one of the stunted trees nearby. Kagome saw through lowered lashes that his delicate ears were edged with frost. He'd settled near her, shivering subtly.

So Sango's hunter's-knowledge has saved them again. No matter how terribly uncomfortable it might be, the rock beneath is warm and Kagome is as grateful for it as she can manage. Her breath cuts lines of thick fog through the looming darkness, like little ghosts fluttering out of her mouth, and she does not like to consider how cold she would be otherwise, curled and trembling in a bed of ice-limned grass.

Winter is coming. There's no doubt of that, not after tonight. In a quiet way, Kagome is dismayed, though the shifting of seasons hardly affects her plans or her mission; she will simply have to move away from the coast to escape the worst weather, and that, in any case, will keep her closer to the well – her gateway to home and relative safety. No; it's a much more personal distaste that moves her. Despite the beauty of snow and the almost supernatural stillness of a world wrapped in ice, Kagome cannot help thinking that winter is a dead season. Cold and uncaring, lovely but supremely lethal. Every year it comes inland surreptiously, creeping like tendrils of plague. Kagome can sense its gentle malice on the tail of a sudden, chilled breeze.

Can sense it keenly, can almost hear it whispering for her from the empty, black maw beyond the lip of her stone mattress.

_A true priestess_ . . .

She sits up slowly, ignoring the cold air that slithers into her mother's old sleeping bag, winds around her legs. The last ember flickers and sighs, drawing thick bronze lines over the curve of Sango's hip, through Kirara's twin tails; its light paints half of Miroku's smooth face like a mask. It gilds, it illuminates, it does not reach past them. The wide, wild field has been erased, swallowed up by a black ocean. And she can hear the slap of waves against a stone shore; can smell salt, and sand-scoured wind; can nearly taste the singing voices that have swept her up and filled her with the image of a beach bled cold and black beneath patient, dragging claws.

"Inuyasha," Kagome whispers. Leaning over Shippo, she stretches out her long body and tugs at his sleeve, his opalescent hair. "_Inuyasha_."

Nothing. He does not move, or give any sign that he has heard her. Shippo is the same, locked up in a deep slumber, and Miroku, and Sango, and even little Kirara. Clutching the fox kit in her arms, Kagome stares at them and tries not to panic.

Winter is coming. So, it seems, is someone with the power to steal people away in their dreams.

After a moment, Kagome carefully tucks Shippo into the folds of her sleeping bag and digs out the heavy, knitted sweater her mother forced her to pack. As it slips over her head, she smells – rather than the terrible, false scent of a phantom sea – lilacs and candy-sweet roses; her mother's perfume. She takes a little confidence from that, though she doesn't understand why. Hugging herself tightly, she gazes warily at all the things she cannot see and then starts forward.

She can feel the path her feet should take, and – suddenly, with what must be the faith of a true, pious priestess – she knows what she must do.

* * *

Kikyou is easily the most beautiful creature Kagome has ever seen. She knows that she should take pride in this, having descended directly from the drifting pieces of her soul, but it is difficult to be proud when her throat and lungs and mouth are clogged with so much crusted guilt. Gazing at the woman she was born to imitate, Kagome feels like a thief, a crude copy, and her legs lock and she can barely keep her footing in the slippery grass, let alone turn to flee. 

_What do you want?_ she tries to demand, imposing, imperious, a fierce spirit clothed in deceptively delicate flesh. But her lips part and it is so cold that her tongue freezes and the words are suctioned out soundlessly, rising in a cloud of fog to the severe, silent sky. She begins to quiver, so violently now that she cannot conceal it.

Kikyou looks at her evenly. Kikyou is perfectly still and untroubled, at home in the darkness, in the cold, in the casual danger of the night. Her white robes and pale skin glow discreetly; clouds crowd the heavens, but she is the moon, radiant and unreachable as ever.

"Did you remember me," she asks quietly, "before we first met?"

* * *

Kikyou remembers: 

A time before memory in the forest near her home. Golden light in the broken spaces open to the sky, leaves and moss wrapped like lace about the dark, elegant limbs arched and curled and fanned out above her head. They were like dancers' arms, those black branches – painted, inked, and dusted with ash – flaring in the fashion of a festival demon dance. This, she realizes, is the forest through a child's eyes; all the light and shadow stitched seamlessly together, sunbeams from the sky winking playfully at the world below, trees dancing and weaving to the pulsing rhythm of an immortal heart. Sanctuary. The semblance of home.

In that same forest, she found a broken man who called himself Onigumo, fell beneath the arc of a half-demon's claws, and died thinking that there is no such thing as love.

She is far from that forest now. From that time, that terror, that tragedy. Her memories of it – and all the waves and waves of faces – are fast becoming abstract things; fascinating, perhaps, but nearly unrecognizable. She stands above them, looking down, nothing more than a spectator. She is benign. She keeps them as if they are pets, and covets them simply because they are the one thing she has that Kagome does not.

Kagome, a timid wraith trembling in the deep, heartless night, stares at her and seems to understand.

_Priestess_, say the silvered waves. _Priestess, where is our shore? Where have you gone? What have you done?_

Kikyou and Kagome smell the salt of the sea, feel the darkness and the dead water clasp them like greedy jaws. Despite the clouds swelling overhead, there is enough light for them to see that they have each other's eyes.

As one, they reply; "what I must."

* * *

Kagome is not afraid. 

Kikyou is not angry.

_Priestess_.

Kagome remembers Kaede's young face and nimble hands. Blood does not frighten her, and she knows how to dispell summoned demonlings with a thought. Swift and strong, she is a better warrior than most young men. Her friends tell her that she should resent her older sister, that _she_ should be the primary priestess of their village, but Kaede is loyal. Kaede is clever. Kaede is missing an eye; _tell them to burn this with my body_;_ you will do well alone, do not fear, please do not fear please do not._

_The shore, Priestess._

Kikyou remembers Souta's fleet feet and ready smile, thinks with fond irritation on the tricks he plays, the little lies he has told. Though he complains about Grandpa's sutras and stories, he can repeat them all without pause for breath. He is the fastest runner in his grade, he is the son of the family, the traditional heir, and at every turn he makes his sister do everything for him. Even when Buyo escapes his arms, he hangs back and watches the well, waiting for someone else to search, waiting and then running forward, forgetting his own cowardice, trying and failing to save his sister from a creature like the ones in all the stories he never believed.

_The shore_.

Both remember Kikyou as she once was. A guardian. A warrior and a woman, fighting to lie in the same flesh. Her hands are calloused; her legs are slender. Scars hatch her palms and wrists; smooth skin sheathes the narrow cage of her ribs, the gentle dip and surge of waist into hips. Though the feeling takes her by surprise, Kagome is not embarassed to know the body of another woman so well. It is right, somehow; it is closer to the heart than mother – sister – daughter. It is knowledge of self, moving between two selves, like shared blood and newborn dreams.

They had known that this would happen. They knew that it must. Broken things seek to mend themselves, from jewel shards to severed souls.

_It divides_.

_

* * *

Did you remember me, she had asked, and the girl finally answered: _

_I'm the memory_.

* * *

It occurs to Kikyou that the dead sleep so soundly because they have earned it. Life demands many efforts and emotions, and those who have died are those who have fufilled all that has been asked of them. They have suffered. They have loved. They have failed and triumphed and wept for the sake of both. They deserve their peace, and are released from their mortal burdens slowly – forgetting – being forgotten – until there is nothing left beyond an absence of memory. 

And she has not earned that.

As a priestess, a white maiden of great purity and power, she is bound by the will of the gods to protect, to defend, to keep whole the things that are most precious. It is her duty. Oaths were taken, training was endured, and she was meant to live a long life devoted to serving everyone save herself. To keeping things whole, and mending things that were broken.

Like jewels.

Like souls.

Kikyou is alone in the night. She had thought herself beyond mercy, but she let the girl go free. This one last time, she told herself; just to see her disappear this one last time. The darkness still gleams and chuckles with impossible iridescence, marked by the passing of a girl with fearsome power. Power that does not belong to her. Ability that is not her own. Shrouded in the stillness of the unborn and a moonlit breath that snakes through the clouds, Kikyou contemplates everything that has been taken from her.

_Priestess_, her memories say, after a long, long silence. _We can tell you how to take it back_.

And she remembers at last what it is to have a purpose.


	2. Sunrise Alchemy

**Title** - Sunrise Alchemy  
**Pairing** - Kikyou/Kagome  
**Theme**- _Soul  
_**Genre** - General  
**Rating** - G  
**Length** - Drabblish  
**Squicks** - Nope  
**Summary** - The best lessons aren't necessarily those that are carved into the flesh.

* * *

Sunrise Alchemy

Sometimes Kagome wonders if he is aware of her scrutiny.

Like long lines of disease, his senses thread the cold air, splicing shadows, cleaving scents and murmurs and the first light of dawn into a hundred thousand pieces. Tasting. Touching. _Prowling_, even when he seems to sleep. She can see it most clearly when he does not think she is watching; the fractured planes and angles of demonic perception reaching outward, claiming the world and cracking it, edge from edge, sky from earth, leaf from petal from human skin.

Nothing escapes his notice. She knows this. She has seen him wrap the dark web of his senses around his enemies, probing soft skin and old scars and the swollen, watery spaces between failing joints. Weaknesses draw him. His demon side pulls, drags, twists his limbs through dirt and fire to lay hands on flesh that will yield the most blood.

But is he aware of her?

At night, when his demon is particularly restless, he often settles on the ground and stares at her until he falls asleep. His senses snap about her, writhing like a nest of snakes over her skin. Through them, she feels his guilt and the violence of his dreams. He wants to eat her throat out. He thinks she does not know this, thinks that he harbours a dreadful, frenzied hunger in his heart she would never be able to understand. He thinks of her face, and her long fingers, and her dark hair – and, as always, all thoughts lead back to Kikyou, because she is the mother of his discontent. She taught him that human lives should not be taken lightly. She calls softly to him from the corner of Kagome's expressive mouth. Kikyou-Kagome, the soul he loves, has been split by his destructive senses, its gleaming pieces forced into a pair of ill-fitting bodies. And that – they, _she_ – is all he seems to think about.

But is he _aware _of her?

Overcome by curiosity, she rises early one frigid, black morning and decides to find out.

The moon has set. The stars burn in the darkness like unpleasant laughter. There is enough light to let her see the first gloss of dew, shining on the grass and in his long, matted hair.

Smiling, she rolls to her feet and begins to dance with his senses.

They reach; she diverts. They follow; she evades. They have hunted prey far more nimble than she, these demon-keen tendrils combing the night, but she is not afraid. Though her shadow flickers alone across the ashen ground, Kagome feels a slender body pressed against her back, and cool fingers clasp her hands, moving her arms as though she is a wooden marionette. She dances without knowing the proper steps. She wheels and plunges, dressed in midnight silks, driven by someone else's will. Familiar hands guide her, touching wrist, ankle, and throat, harshly and critically; _not like that, like _this.

She draws close to the sleeping demon, kneels before him, peers up into his closed, incautious face.

Unaware. He is unaware of her, and a voice that belongs to Kikyou and to Kagome says: _Now_.

She twitches forward, thrusts out a soft, harmless hand, feels the slow burn of purifying power spread across her palm. Pallid light surges like a starving animal, illuminating the demon, the quarry, the one-that-must-not-escape –

_Wait_.

The wind lifts a wisp of his colourless hair, but she does not recoil. She knows that he has not felt her. Her hand has fallen to rest on her bent knees, cupped as if to catch the sky, fingers curled inward like the legs of a dead spider.

_We know this one_.

True. She knows him. She is aware of him always. And she understands more than he can possibly imagine.

Demons lean over downed prey with bloody lips and glistening eyes. InuYasha has bent above her in the middle of the night many times, no doubt imagining that he had finally allowed himself to bleed her, no doubt certain that she was asleep and ignorant of his presence. It happened not so long ago, on a smug, silent night like this one; he loomed like a black cloud, blocking out the moon; his claws twitched; his eyes shone with the leaping, quivering eagerness of reflected flames. She remembers that, though she never looked up – the fire in him, nibbling away at the dry husk of his humanity.

But he would always – _always_ – slink away to burn alone.

And now. Here she crouches, doubled over like a slinking cat, her flexing paw still sore with the memory of power. She could have killed him. She nearly did. Summoning power, tempering it, focusing it on a single target – she does not know how to do any of that, but it happened nonetheless. As InuYasha suffers his demonic instinct, she suffers _this_.

_What is this?_

Silently, following the slivered pattern of starlight and shadows painted across the ground, she makes her way back to her blankets. For the first time she recognizes that she is cold. That she is exhausted.

Still, she does not let herself stumble. The guiding hands slap her just before she steps on a dried flower stem. InuYasha turns his ear toward her, briefly, then lapses back into his dreams of Kikyou's death.

As she settles back into dreams of her own, she too thinks of Kikyou. Of her cool fingers, her fierceness, and the wealth of knowledge she possessed – all as sleek and sure as the shaft of her finest arrow. At the base of her spine, Kagome feels an icy point of pain, a puncture wound struck from the inside. It aches and never heals; it pulses with fury when demons draw near. It is a lesson stitched into the fabric of her spirit, a lesson so well learned that her flesh will answer to it without her consent.

It is Kikyou's only gift to her.

The alchemy spells of the rising sun paint dusky, golden crowns on the tallest of the trees. Kagome lies on her side, watching gilded leaves rush along the slope of a crisp breeze, flailing at the sky like a hundred tiny hands. And, as her eyes slip shut, she feels someone curl close against her back, press chill fingers over her phantom-wounds.

Balanced on the edge of a dream, she hears a voice that belongs to Kikyou and to Kagome say: _The scars of some lessons reach straight to your soul_.


	3. Abracadaver

**Title** - Abracadaver  
**Pairing** - Kikyou/Kagome  
**Theme** - _Magic_  
**Genre** - General  
**Rating** - 13+  
**Length** - Drabblish  
**Squicks** - Character deaths**  
Summary** - There is no magic in the world that can save us from cold logic.

* * *

Abracadaver

The water holds her like a great, cold hand; a fisted embrace. She is cupped in its smooth palm, she is slowly draining through the spaces between its fingers toward the deep darkness below. Far from breath. Far from light. So far that she can hardly hear the beating of her own heart.

Above, the surface gleams like a phantom sky, alive with luminosity. Flecks of colour tint the undersides of tiny waves and ripples – gold and green and a tremor of violet darker than rim of a bone-rending wound. She can see herself there. She can see her reflection, though she may only be imagining it; her hair has lifted from her shoulders with the slow, patient purpose of a serpent, and it rears and sways, and it fills her eyes with shadows; she may only be imagining it.

She is not. At the centre of the pool – at the centre of all things – Kagome finds her reflection in the water.

Kikyou is a thing of glass and ivory, wrapped in silk. Breathless. Weightless. Her eyes are closed, her lips are still, she is waiting for something. Waiting, and trapped here, and waiting.

"You shouldn't have come," she says.

_We're underwater_, Kagome wants to reply. _Don't speak; we can't_._ We're underwater_.

Encased in crystal, Kikyou laughs. A cold current toys with the edge of her sleeve. Her lips are still.

"What happened?" she asks.

_Naraku killed you_. _He killed you_.

"He can't kill me. I am already dead."

Kagome drifts. Somewhere, in a far away place, her lungs are burning, her throat is beginning to spasm, her body is sinking and she cannot stop it. She falls. The deep darkness leaps to greet her. Kikyou comes between them both, and suddenly Kagome is resting on her like a child – safe and settled – slipping in and out of a frightening sense of peace.

_I'm sorry_.

"I know that. I've always known that, and it never helps."

With filmy, unwilling eyes, Kagome looks up at the surface and all of the broken colours rushing across the inside of its belly. It is far away, so astoundingly far, but she sees every shape, every flicker of bronze, of yellow, of brilliant blue. They fit together, she realizes. The pieces. The shapes and shades. They make a picture when she looks at them all.

"Why did you come here?"

_I had to come_._ I had no other choice_. _Could I leave you?_

"You could have."

_No_.

Lines of crimson lace the water like blood, and there is a whiteness brighter than sunshine. Kagome peers close, fighting with a creeping numbness in her limbs, and recognizes InuYasha. She is looking at a picture of him, taken in a long-ago time.

"I will take him if you heal me," Kikyou says softly, and her blue lips part. There is no air inside her, no soul or hope or love, so nothing leaves. The cold, dark water beneath her begins to pluck at the tips of her fingers. "Heal me."

Kagome is looking at a picture of InuYasha. On the silvery side of a delicate wave, she is watching him fall in love with Kikyou.

"You have the magic. Heal me."

Kikyou is sinking. Her lovely hands lift, only because the rest of her body is falling away. She seems to reach upward – not to touch the light, but to grasp the image of InuYasha, to clutch him in her fingers and hold him in this terrible stillness until the flesh falls from their bones and they settle on the rocks below; sleeping, speaking, trapped here forever.

"You have the magic; you cannot leave me."

_And I won't_.

And she does not.

It occurs to Kagome, briefly, that she must be dying. The waves flicker as though in pain; a sigh of lazy, quiet denial churns the air to water and the water to blood. But, as she and Kikyou slowly descend, the darkness shields them from all the bright accusation lancing downward, from the crowding warmth of the world above and the impossible happy endings calling after them, calling for a second chance, another day. There is serenity. There is escape, for herself, and her soul, and even for the half-demon who will never understand that she has done this for his own good.

The shattered colours waver uncertainly, then swim away. Soon, the vision of InuYasha is gone, and Kikyou follows him, and Kagome will not leave her. In Kagome's mind, they all vanish together.

Like magic.


	4. Scarlet As Sin

**Title** - Scarlet As Sin  
**Pairing** - Kikyou/Kagome  
**Theme** - _Sunset_  
**Genre** - General  
**Rating** - 13+  
**Length** - 1813 words  
**Squicks** - Rampant failure to make much reference to the pairing (!). Otherwise, no.**  
Summary** - Because everything that Kikyou did was exalted, and everything she didn't do is Kagome's fault.

* * *

Scarlet As Sin

There's blood in the sky, and Kagome wonders if it's her fault.

Must be.

She's loosed one too many stray arrows in her time here, just one beyond the unspoken limit. Truth be told, she only loosed the _one_, but that was more than enough. Sleek as dragon's claw, it leaped from the string of her bow, and it broke jewels and hope and lives into thousands of a thousand pieces. Now – now it's stuck in the sky and blood is welling along the horizon, red as sin.

The funny part is, the bow isn't even hers; neither is the time. Both are – like everything she's been given by this place, these people – more of Kikyou's cast-offs.

Kagome never asked to be another Kikyou.

Kagome never wanted to hurt anyone.

But the villagers bend low when she passes, murmuring; _Priestess_ – just loud enough for her to hear. Women come to her for healing herbs, for help and blessings during childbirth, their long sleeves trailing in the dirt as they bow, again and again, giving thanks for things she does not know how to offer. She has noted each time that they stutter on her name, wanting to call her Kikyou because that's all she is to them.

And Inuyasha has begun to flinch every time she draws near, filthy and unkempt but trying to be proud of what she has accomplished at the end of the day. She assumes that it means she looks like a priestess when she's exhausted.

"Kagome."

She doesn't respond, though the voice is soft and slow and maternal. That's not her name; that kind call is not meant for her.

Someone takes her arm, turns her around. "Kagome, girl." The hands closing on her are worn, chapped to softness like old leather, but she can feel the bones beneath the skin; good bones, strong and solid. All the hollow spaces have been filled with years, patience, wisdom. "The open night is no place for you. Come inside."

She allows herself to be pressed forward, into the darkness of Kaede's small, sturdy hut. Through the old priestess' tired hands, she can feel the weight of her steps, and the sudden, startling limp that plucks at her hips, threatening to shake the joints apart.

"I'm sorry," Kagome says, and means it. "I was just thinking."

Kaede nods and thrusts her toward the mat spread out before the cold, dark firepit, a gesture that Kagome has learned not to resent. It's a kindness, really, a firm push in the right direction; better to sit down and work than to dwell on scarlet skies.

Feeling her way through the dusty shadows, Kagome gathers up everything she needs, listening to Kaede shuffle back and forth across the reed floor. It's strange, but Kagome has always found that the old priestess seems more adept in the dark; with a cool hand, the night smoothes her wrinkles away and weaves nets of shadow all around her hut, through which only she can navigate without stumbling. Half-blind, and weak with the weight of her age, she moves without hesitation. Like a shadow on the sea. Kagome watches her from the corner of one eye – she has closed the other, in sympathy or curiosity, wanting to see what it's like to witness only half of the world around her.

It's dark.

The flame Kagome strikes is tall and golden, meant for light more than warmth or smoke. Undulating under her hands, it is the same colour as the sun outside; deep orange, nearly bronze, and all of the red light leaks out and out, an endless sea of the mistakes Kagome has made.

From the gloom, shadowed Kaede says at last; "I know what you think about, all these days and nights you spend staring out at everything faint and far away."

Kagome watches the flame grow. She shivers, bathed in its thin current of heat, and says nothing.

"Take this for what it is; I don't discourage you. Any good young girl should learn to think for herself, even if it costs her a husband. 'Better dead than dull,' Kikyou would tell me as a child. Certainly, I thought she must be mad, but I realize what she meant now. A husband, and a life, and sometimes even honour cannot compare to the power of what we know."

Wind ruffles the grass outside, and Kaede's uneven steps go silent for a moment. Kagome smells flowers and freshly turned earth, glimpses a star through the open doorway. Limned in firelight, an old woman's silhouette puts a hand against the wall and moves its lips in the shape of the words; _better dead than dull_.

"But," Kaede says, so hoarsely that she must clear her throat and start again. "But, girl, let me be the one to tell you that we all _think_. We all have things to fear and lament, even those of us who have promised to live a life without regret, in memory of our loved ones."

"I know," Kagome replies, leaning forward so far that she nearly burns her fingers, and then – finally – she speaks the words aloud for the first time: "I never meant to hurt anybody. To," she looks up at her star-through-the-door and the darkness creeping out from behind it like a shadow, or a fresh scar forming over the sky; and there is so much beauty in that one star that she chokes on it, unable to breathe; "make anyone regret anything."

"Kikyou used to watch the skies as you do."

Some nameless force prevents Kagome from running away, or reaching deep into the fire and throwing its wild, secret coals into the lovely illusion of Kaede's face. Always that name, always that remembered girl; in this one mad moment, Kagome wants nothing more than to rip her out of the air, out of time and memory, and let her name float along through the ages, devoid of meaning. Instead, she glances over at the old, bent priestess swaying against the wall and she feels the stirring of something terrible inside her. It's called compassion and she cannot begin to count the number of times it has curled up in her lap when all she really wanted was to be left alone.

Making her way to the door, Kaede stands in the last of the daylight and her voice has become slow and strange. "Sunrise and sunset, stars and birds and clouds; anything that touched the sky was close to her heart. I will always believe that she loved all of it more than she did any living thing, even I, her own sister – except, perhaps, for Inuyasha."

"She did love you," Kagome says, almost sullenly, not quite sure what she is arguing against.

"Of course. She loved me, and the village, and all of the people in it. Sometimes I think that it was the loving that killed her; there was too much of it in her heart, and she could not bear to see those she held beloved harmed by the sight of her pain. She might have died to spare us, only to come back with the intention of plucking out our souls. I don't know. I simply do not, and I am sorry, Kagome, girl. I am."

"Don't say that. Just – " And she had to think of something, some whisper or demand that would distract her from the desire to spit on the mountain of apologies following her like a tail. "Do you know _why_ she always did that?"

Suspended between the warm womb of the inside and the wildness of the outside, Kaede casts long shadows that ache on the ground like a fan of bruises – Kaede glows amber, winking sunlight as she tilts her head minutely. Kagome can almost hear her think, _What's that, Kagome, girl?_

So she adds; "the stars. Why she looked at them, and the birds and the clouds. Do you know?"

Slowly, Kaede nods. "I do, though I never asked and she never told me. There was so much I meant to ask, and then forgot. But I could guess, dear girl; I've had fifty years now to make my guesses, and there are some that are truer to the mark than others, and there are some that I know to be nothing less than truth. She loved the sky because it was so far away. And there was nothing she could do, no error she could make to harm the heart of the sky."

The sun slips through Kaede's raised fingers, and all of the bright bloodstains go with it, draining downward and outward, away from the descending dark. Even if there is an arrow buried in heavenly flesh somewhere, no one will be able to see it, not anymore.

"She would be proud, I think," Kaede continues, murmuring to the sweet scent of the wind, lowering her hand reluctantly. "Of you, that is. The bond between you both runs deeper than sisterhood. If she was herself, she would realize that, and cherish it."

"And what about you?" Kagome asks, standing, straightening. The fire licks affectionately at her legs, urging her forward, so she goes. She stands at Kaede's elbow, and she waits.

"I?" The old priestess shifts. Though she keeps her face hidden, Kagome knows somehow that it bears a smile, and knows also that the smile she does not see is false. "I would only miss my sister as much as I already do."

"Your sister," Kagome says, ignoring the unpleasant twisting of her insides, "is right here."

"As much of her as is left in this world, I suppose."

"Yes. Just that much."

Without a word, Kaede turns. She puts a hand on one of Kagome's skinny shoulders, rests her head on the other. And the girl wonders what it is she should do, and can think of nothing, so she thinks a little harder. By the violet sheen of twilight, the sky has been wiped clean of refuse, coaxing the stars from their hidden membranes; they glitter overhead like the pieces of something precious that was shattered. Kagome gazes up at them and arrives at a solution. She puts an arm across Kaede's crooked back – she thinks of her family, of homesickness, and tries not to think about what it must be like to miss someone forever.

As a young and powerful priestess, as the reincarnation of a demon-hunter of unparalleled skill, it doesn't seem like enough. Then again, Kagome never did know much about being either one of those things. It's a _sister_ she's been, and a sister she'll die someday – and at a nameless point between _has been_ and _someday_ lies all the power she has ever really needed.

For the first time, she doesn't mind being mistaken for someone she isn't; it must be weariness that makes her so complacent, so soft-hearted, so intent on defending a woman five times her own age. It must be that, and nothing else.

Over Kaede's shoulder, Kagome stares at the sky.

Must be.


	5. Embody

**Title** - Embody  
**Pairing** - Kikyou/Kagome  
**Theme** - Whisper(s)  
**Genre** - Dark fantasy  
**Rating** - T  
**Word Count** - 3630  
**Squicks** - Implied yuri  
**Notes** - This is something of an experimental piece, written under unusual circumstances. Some readers might find it a little disjointed.  
**Summary** - Anybody can whisper, about love, or hatred, or eternity. And anybody could be listening.

* * *

Embody

At the very bottom of the well, it is very dry and strangely bright. Framed by the wooden lip high above her head – which must have spit splinters into her palm as she was pulled over it, she notes with a small sigh – flecks of blue sky blink serenely down at her through the clouds, and light spills along the twisting, curving tendrils of ivy that web the walls, offering their fingertips in the place of a ladder. Cradling her speckled hands, Kagome approaches and plucks timidly at a few leaves. They are thick and difficult to rip, qualities she can only take as a good sign. She still doubts that any plant in the world could hold her full weight while she flails and clambers up its stem, but the well itself was solidly built. There are no loose stones, no gaps in which to stuff her feet and fingers – so this is her only option. She grabs the longest vine and begins climbing, ignoring the hot ache beating on her palms. Overhead, the watching sky slowly grows larger, wider, perhaps surprised by her progress.

Halfway to the top, the knot of leaves beneath her feet snaps apart with a wet pop, like the sound of breaking bones, and the vines shake violently, gasping and hissing as she struggles to hold herself against them, and it occurs to her that she should see the dark, dusty ceiling beams of the wellhouse, not clouds and sky and healthy, green plants. Then she decides that she cannot really be in the well, because that would mean she had in fact been dragged into it by a woman with arms and arms and arms, whose mouth dripped fangs, and that simply was not possible.

But there is no denying the situation she is in. Her body is pressed flat against the wellstones; the dirt from its dry floor has caked her new shoes; trees peek at her as she climbs, living trees that still wear green robes and have not been forced to lie in the shape of a building.

Also, it is very quiet. Moreso than she would have thought possible in the city, but then she sees that the city is not where she left it.

Clawing her way into the clashing, crashing glare of a beautiful place she has never seen before, Kagome calls: "Souta? Souta!"

No one answers. Absolutely no one, save birds and creaking insects and the wind.

She slides from the lip of the well, stumbles, falls and scrapes her knees. They burn, taking up the same painful beat keeping time in her hands.

"_Whispers_?" she cries.

They are somewhere in the distance; she feels them vaguely like the pain prickling along the last layers of her skin. But they do not answer.

Fighting panic, Kagome scrambles up and dashes after their echoes.

* * *

She hears them sometimes. Words, where there are no voices; voices, from a deep, dark maw that her mother calls _Don't play near the well_. They are soft and sweet – they are scaled in shards of glass – they soothe her, accuse her, and, no matter how many times she reminds them, they coldly refuse to remember her name.

Resonating in the shadowy spaces between her bones, they are named: the _whispers_. When she was younger, Kagome always wondered why; she has never known them to do anything but scream.

* * *

_This is a dream_.

"Why have you given this to me?"

_There are people in armour kneeling before you, as if they have been conquered_._ Demonslayers_.

"You fools."

_You are speaking to them_.

"You thoughtless, useless, heartless, godless – "

_You are screaming at them_.

" – motherless, genderless children of a hundred, rutting demons!"

_But you didn't really say all of this_.

"You cowardly bastards!"

_You lacked the courage to do anything more than stare, and think_:

"_WHY DON'T _YOU_ DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS?_"

_Yes, why?_

* * *

Kneeling – and enduring vehement protests about it from both raw legs – she stares openly at the familiar strangeness of the people staring back at her. She has seen them before. Has, at least, seen all the different components of their homes and bodies, sketched out and described in the books she left sitting on her desk, in her room, in her house – all of which have vanished and been replaced by near-endless forest, by crudely tended fields, by huts made of clay-brick and straw.

These people, incidentally, are mostly women and children – _"During the day, women with progeny remained at home, where they spent time not only preparing food and tending their children but maintaining the village itself,"_ page ninety-six of her history textbook said dutifully – and they are dressed in well-worn traditional yukata of the sort that any girl Kagome's age should find mortifyingly out-of-style. So she takes particular interest in a group of girls her age who bend together, clutching their patterned sleeves and sneering at her long, bare legs. After a while, their contempt makes Kagome uncomfortable; she turns deliberately away and folds her hands in her lap, wishing that she had been carrying a sweater or something else she could drape there.

The old woman sitting directly across from her, at least, has decided to overlook her apparently indecent appearance. In most cases, Kagome wouldn't even have cared what some musty witch thought about her clothing – but something is different about this woman. Something besides the glaringly obvious things that surround her, like a circle of painted phantoms.

Perched on her age-sloped shoulders, unseen but not unknown, Kagome recognizes a trace of the _whispers_. And they recognize her.

_Kaede_, they say. Over and over again, like a recording: _Kaede_.

"Kaede?" Kagome echoes, curious.

The old woman flinches away from the name, halting the smooth, accented flow of her speech with a sudden breath. Kagome is relieved; she understood only fragments of what was being said – something about punishment for tresspassing, and "ground untrod for fifty of all years remaining", and a white-magic curse – through the maze of archaic terms and inflections. This place, she decides, is old. Not just this woman and her words; all of what she has said finds resonance here, and women are nodding sternly, holding onto the shoulders of young boys who understand but would rather run off after wandering chickens. It is Kagome who speaks in a jumbled, corrupt tongue, and she had been starting to feel embarassed again.

"Yes," the woman replies, and her one uncovered eye gleams distrustfully.

"Thought so. Do I – " It feels foolish to ask, so she falters briefly – "know you?"

That single, dark eye widens. In surprise or perhaps even outrage at first, but all of that quickly fades away. Then it mists with tears, and Kagome feels an inexplicable flexing of sorrow in the centre of her chest.

_Kaede_, the _whispers_ say in affirmation, and drift off in a more important direction.

* * *

Inuyasha is introduced with such gently wistful nostalgia that Kagome draws close without even thinking. The way his name is spoken suits the place in which he rests; the light is soft and slow, the shadows are hung from long, lean branches like a string of silver beads, and most of all this is the one thing Kagome can name and know on her own: Goshinboku, younger here, and wearing his veil of sleeping magic in the guise of a sweet, sleeping boy.

Kagome rather wished he had stayed asleep, once he was awake. The _whispers _only flicker with laughter at the sound of his voice, his practiced show of arrogance and ferocity. Then rise up in fear, anger, uncertainty. Then swoop and clash against each other, shrieking about _arms and arms and arms_.

It is from Kaede that Kagome finally learns the name of the fierce little ball of luminescence leaping with the blood from the split in her side. As it soars into the open air, the _whispers_ make the words _Shikon jewel_ into a terrible song of hatred and clamour with no meaning beyond the pain they see inside it.

* * *

"I was very young when it was brought to my sister. A group of demonslayers came and requested an audience with her – I thought they were part of an army, now that I come to it, and that they would take Kikyou away, though they were and they did in a way, I suppose. But never mind. They wore their armour and held their weapons while they knelt for her, and then a man at the front lifted his head and said terrible things about the jewel he had just put into my sister's hand. I don't recall much of it, just that I dreamed of demons for weeks afterward. And Kikyou kept the jewel around her neck from then on, and she killed demons who came to steal it, and men, as well. There were a few of those."

"When they gave it to her – when the demonslayers were kneeling, I mean, and asking her to take the jewel – do you remember if she was angry?"

"Kikyou? Oh, no. She only looked at them, I remember that. She looked at them, and nodded, and that was that."

"I guess it was."

* * *

Kagome has been following Inuyasha's sharp, tireless silhouette for hours. Every time she stumbles, his ear twitches backwards; involuntarily it seems, because he always swivels it forward again the moment she calls for him to slow down, and then walks a little more quickly – the rhythm of his footsteps changes just enough to let her notice.

When she becomes too short of breath to shout at him, he finally stops and offers coldly to carry her on his back.

Wishing she had the strength to refuse out of spite, she accepts, though she pulls his hair as she settles herself between his shoulderblades. Accidentally.

* * *

"Mama," Kagome says, her young brow squeezed tight with concentration. No lines mark her skin – it will be years before she needs to worry about that – but when her mother brushes the soft, black hair away from her eyes, she can see muscles pinching together, like fingers trying to hold down a particularly elusive thought.

So Mrs. Higurashi cannot help smiling, though she knows that she should try to be serious. "What is it, sweetheart?"

"What do I need friends for?"

"Friends?" For a moment, she is nonplussed. "Is something the matter between you and your friends?" A note of confidence comes into her voice as she grasps at that idea, because it is the only possibility, and one easily dealt with. "Did you have another fight with Ayame?"

And Kagome twists her lips into a suspiciously insincere frown, rolling big, dark, liquid eyes that are sure to enchant all the boys by the time she outgrows her newest summer outfit. Which will be far too soon in her mother's opinion, but – "No, _Mama_. But why do I have to play with Ayame all the time?"

"Don't you like playing with her?"

"I guess. Sometimes."

"Well, what else would you rather be doing, then?"

A heavy sigh. "I don't know."

There is silence while Mrs. Hirurashi holds her daughter and thinks carefully. Unconcerned with her mother's confusion, Kagome sits in her arms and peels split-ends from her own hair, until she receives the customary pat on the hand and an order not to do that anymore.

"Sweetheart, you don't really need friends the way you need food or water. You can live without them – but I don't think you'd have the best life you could if you tried to live without any friends. Good friends will give you advice, and tell you stories and jokes, and help you if you're in trouble. And – and sometimes they'll get angry at you, or you'll get angry at them – but it will probably be because they care about you, or you care about them."

"Like when I go to the well, and you don't want me to fall down it, so you shout," Kagome offers, with only the faintest trace of sulleness in the tilt of her head.

"Yes, like that."

"So I shouldn't be afraid of them." This, like all central questions that Kagome asks, is not spoken as a question. But it is the important one. It is the thing she has been meaning to ask all along, and Mrs. Higurashi is startled.

"Of course not! You should love your true friends with all your heart. The ones who are always _always_ there for you deserve all the love you can give them. That's why you have to be careful, and have the best friends you can find."

"Okay." Suddenly appeased, Kagome hops to the floor and gives a little bow and goes forward to give her mother a hug and a kiss. "Thanks, Mama."

Mrs. Higurashi smiles, glad to have said the right things. She watches proudly as her daughter hurries outside, off no doubt, to spend the last hours of sunlight with the ones she loved the most.

* * *

It makes sense, Kagome decides, even as her mind rebels and her body sinks deeper and deeper into a darkness veined with sharp scents and the harsh bite of practiced magic. As a child, she had always assumed that other children had _whispers _of their own, and as a young woman had simply accepted them as a fact of her life. Since falling through the well, she'd had her suspicions, but now all of the evidence is gathered in one place – on this bleak, faceless hell of a mountain – and she can see what it means, what she should have known all along.

Lying on her back in terrible, clutching oils, she stares up at Urasae through hooded eyes, summoning the will to lash out. But her concentration is shifting. Her focus skitters and slides as though across a globe of ice, not turning to another purpose but lifting itself from her flesh and crawling, crawling toward something more familiar.

There is another woman standing over her. She is pale and small against the iron sky, and her beauty is stunning. Gazing at her, Kagome feels her grip on herself spasm – she would _rather_ be this new girl, so what is she fighting for? Why is she straining away? Why does it feel wrong to want the thing that stands, slack, at Urasae's side, to want to _be_ it?

Out from the shadows in her eyes, the _whispers _slide serpentine. They go toward the still, passionless woman with a sort of trepidation that Kagome has never seen from them before, then circle her, thoughtful.

Somewhere far away, familiar voices are crying out. Kagome tries to ignore them.

_Don't say my name_, the _whispers_ say at last, very softly.

Then they fold around the woman. Things snatch and pull and resist, until finally everything breaks and senseless speech fills the air, ringing against the mountainside though the mountain is not listening even as all the world is uprooted and the shadows are held back by nothing anymore.

* * *

In a whisper, Inuyasha says, "_Kikyou_."

* * *

This also is a dream.

_So why are you still here?_

* * *

A very long time ago – fifty years, to be precise, which may not be that long after all, depending on who's asked – Kikyou came to the conclusion that there was little sense in letting the bastard who'd killed her get away with it, even if she'd once loved him enough to hate him as much as she did now. So she used the last of her strength to strike at him, but the last wasn't enough to make him die – or perhaps some part of herself had rebelled against the intention, which would be even worse – and she died of the shame more than anything else, while he slept and dreamed of the fury in her eyes.

Now that he's awake again, the dream is a dim blur in comparison.

* * *

Someone is calling her. Shaking her. Asking – demanding to know – if she is all right.

Someone. Not the _whispers_. They have fled again, in an auspicious direction, toward significant things, and they are calling her as well, without purpose, without knowing why.

_Habit_, she wants to tell them, but they cannot hear. Will not be able to hear ever again. Foreign flesh traps them; the body that was once theirs, the mind, the identity. They are not hers anymore, and they cannot hear her.

So she will find them. She will make them hear.

To the sound of many urgent, frightened voices, Kagome wakes from a deep sleep like death and sends her invitation echoing silently down all the lines of power she has ever touched with her stolen soul.

* * *

"Kikyou-onee-sama," Kaede says, turning her wide, unblinking eyes to the sentinel trees. "Is there anyone in the world that you love more than most others?"

The question does not come as a surprise, and it troubles Kikyou only a little that her sister's gaze strays immediately to the forest in which Inuyasha has made his home. Soon she will have to be told the truth, or will piece it together on her own, and either way will understand in a way that no one else ever could. But – not yet. Secrecy is safety, and it is alluring and hard to cast away; Kikyou thinks, _Only a few more weeks_, and smiles faintly at Kaede.

"You, and that is all. Even so, I know what it is that youwould like to know. And I want you to let your heart be at peace, Kaede-chan. Love answers to love, and you will recognize its voice someday, and you will answer it."

The girl sighed. "Yes, but when?"

Turned toward the forest and the mountains, Kaede did not see Kikyou's smile grow warm and bright like the peak of a summer sky. "Truthfully, I don't know. Later. When you least expect it. Only be sure that you look for it in all things, and that you do not turn it away when it does come to you."

"I wouldn't turn it away," Kaede says wistfully.

"You might without ever knowing. Or you may think that it's something you want from a certain person. Remember to be careful; love will give you power over others. Do not refuse it when it is offered sincerely, and don't abuse it when it is yours. Such a thing is fitting only for a man or woman whose heart has died."

"Yes, Kikyou-onee-sama."

"For now, we should simply leave these matters to fate. You have more than enough time to sort them out." Reaching to touch Kaede's hair gently, she adds quietly, "We both do."

* * *

Love anwers to love. And so does lust, and violence, and greed, and jealousy, and . . .

* * *

When she finally catches up to them, she finds that they have been waiting for her, leading her on, wanting to see her again.

"What for?" she asks, grimacing as her hopeful heart thunders against the misgivings stored deep inside it.

Kikyou lifts her chin, and _whispers_, "Morbid curiosity."

* * *

She is lying wrapped in an dark, impossible spill of velvety hair that is but is not her own. The _whispers_ are a wild chaos all around her, speaking without language, simply filling the wide, empty spaces of the world with the sound of their presence. It is night; the darkness presses close, like a supple body. There can be nothing and no one else in this place they have made; no intruders, no warriors or thieves, certainly no shapes or sounds that have not been familiar since the beginning of memory.

They are perfectly still, folded over and across and all around each other until the _whispers_ finally quiet themselves, like the sea after a storm.

Kikyou makes a soft noise, and begins to reclaim everything that is hers – limbs, hair, clothing, though she spends a moment looking about for something that is, apparently, entirely gone. With all of it clutched in front of her body, she perches in the cold, damp grass, shivering a little – unless that is only a small flicker in Kagome's imagination.

She rises, like the sun and its silver light at dawn. She covers up her body and is dark again, nearly invisible in the night. Only the _whispers_ betray her nearness; she is standing in the tall grass, slender and wary as an ash-gray fox gazing down on prey, or a slumbering enemy, or the wounded mate it must leave behind. She does not speak, and the _whispers _are in her body now, _are_ her body, and Kagome has accepted that she cannot have them anymore. Not in the same way. Not as she always did. Knowing that, however, does not hurt her as much as could, because now she knows something else: there are other ways.

Perhaps Kikyou senses this. Perhaps the _whispers_ have told her. More likely that she has not, they did not, and she intends never to visit this place or this memory again.

Though Kagome does not see it for herself, Kikyou vanishes in pieces – one slow step at a time – and the _whispers _with her. She feels it, she hears it, but it must be morning before she can see it; they have gone, in the way that dreams and nightmares go; seeking darkness in the face of dawn.

* * *

Hidden behind shadow and steel, a creature called Naraku cradles a girl who cradles a mirror. Human whispers range the small, scented chamber they have claimed, and Naraku is the only one who can hear them, though he often makes it a point not to listen.

They gaze raptly at the mirror, at the things they see inside it. Eventually, he grows tired or satisfied, and has the mirror and then the girl put neatly away until he needs them again. All the light and all the scent and all the world sputter out around him slowly, because he is done with that, too.

He sits alone for a time. Or not alone, but motionless, at least.

In the darkness, a voice says reflectively: _then what love there must have been in this heart of mine_.


End file.
